Political MoJo

Cheney and co. have been worried about Rep. Charles Rangel's (D - NY) ascendancy to the chairmanship of the House Committee on Ways and Means, fearing that he will unravel the administration's tax cuts for the wealthy when he takes control in January. But taxes aren't all Rangel is focused on, as he tries to force Congress to face the toll that an all-volunteer army is having on a country entrenched in an increasingly dangerous war.

On Face the Nation this morning Rangel said that he'll introduce a bill next year that would reinstate the draft. This will be the third time Rangel, a Harlem Democrat, will introduce the prospect of a draft, though this time he will do so from a more prominent position of power, in a climate of an increasingly stretched armed forces, and in the face of, as Bush-confidante Henry Kissinger put it today, the impossibility of victory in Iraq.

Some of you may remember (though it was not well-publicized) back in January 2003, before this war even got rolling, when Rangel proposed a draft for 18-26 year olds -- the bill was defeated 402-2. This year he offered a plan to mandate military service for men and women between age 18 and 42; it also went nowhere.

Rangel has consistently argued that the all-volunteer military disproportionately puts the burden of war on minorities and lower-income families. A Korean War veteran himself Rangel received both a Purple Heart and Bronze Star for his service. In February Rangel had this to say of the prospect of a draft:

"Every day that the military option is on the table, as declared by the President in his State of the Union address, in Iran, North Korea, and Syria, reinstatement of the military draft is an option that must also be considered, whether we like it or not. If the military is already having trouble getting the recruits they need, what can we do to fill the ranks if the war spreads from Iraq to other countries? We may have no other choice but a draft."

Rangel went on:

"I don't expect my bill to pass; my purpose in introducing this legislation is for it to serve as a constant reminder that we have lost 2,200 of the best, brightest and bravest Americans, have had thousands more maimed, and countless Iraqi citizens killed. As the President speaks of a national response involving the military option, military service should be a shared sacrifice."

It's unclear how symbolic a gesture the bill will be this time around. Senator Lindsey Graham (R - S.C.), who is also in the Air Force reserve, responded to the idea saying, "I think we can do this with an all-voluntary service, all-voluntary Army, Air Force, Marine Corps and Navy. And if we can't, then we'll look for some other option."

Outgoing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told Congress last summer that "there isn't a chance in the world that the draft will be brought back." But then again, Bush said Rummy would be with us till the end, so hey, anything's possible.

It's been widely rumoured for years, but now the Chinese government has admitted it: the organs of executed criminals are sold to people needing transplants, many of whom are Americans looking for cut-rate body parts. In fact, dead prisoners are the country's top source of harvested organs, second only to car-crash victims. At least 1,700 people were put to death last year in the People's Republic, and thousands of kidneys, livers and hearts were transplanted. Guess they've topped the US in both capital punishment and capitalist innovation.

Last night, nearly one thousand striking janitors met at the corner of Travis and Capitol in Houston in preparation for a protest march to Houston Police Department Headquarters on Travis Street. The four-week-old strike resulted in fourteen arrests on Wednesday, when striking janitors and union organizers chained themselve to the Chevron building in Houston. The janitors are striking in the hope of getting health benefits and a raise in wage to $8.50 an hour. The average current wage is $5.30 an hour. They also report numerous civil rights abuses and failure of management to bargain in good faith. The five main companies involved are Hines, Transwestern, Crescent, Brookfield Properties, and Chevron.

Last night's march never took place, however, because mounted Houston police officers rushed into the crowd, injuring four people. Forty-four were arrested. One of the janitors described the scene:

The horses came all of a sudden. They started jumping on top of people. I heard the women screaming. A horse stomped on top of me. I fell to the ground and hurt my arm. The horses just kept coming at us. I was terrified. I never thought the police would do something so aggressive, so violent.

One of the injured strikers was Hazel Ingram, an 83-year-old janitor from New York. Ingram was taken to the hospital for treatment of an arm injury. Several protesters report being stepped on by horses. Spectators said that the police grabbed a sign that said Stand Up For the American Dream, threw it to the ground, stomped on it, and then joined other officers in giving high-fives.

It was $2 billion in appropriations for 700 miles of fencing that Republican Senators Jon Kyl and Jeff Sessions slipped into a Pentagon spending bill in August just before the Senate recessed. Mother Jonesreported on the myriad opposition to this original bill in September. Now the program for a virtual fence, which is what the Department of Homeland Security has deemed their preferred plan, is being piloted along a 28-mile area in the Tucson Sector, where immigration is most dense. (Charles Bowden reported extensively on this desert area of Arizona in the September/October issue of Mother Jones.)
But the Inspector General's office may have thrown a kink in the DHS' plan. Last Wednesday, the DHS watchdog forecasted that it could cost as much as $30 billion to create the desired virtual fence. And with a Democrat-controlled Congress, the warnings could very wll be heeded. To further add insult to injury, the Inspector General's office released this report in December of 2005, which shows that virtual technology along the border doesn't work anyway.

The presiding judge in the case seems to think so. Judge William Alsup of San Francisco's federal court, hearing arguments in a case pitting Chevron against aggrieved residents of the Ecuadorian Amazon, was perplexed why Chevron's lawyers hadn't asked to relocate the case to South America. "It's a legitimate question to ask," he recently said from the bench. Alsup was no doubt aware that Texaco (now Chevron) faced a similar case in New York in 1993 (jungle, pollution, health problems) and won a motion to send it to Ecuador. "Let me hear from 'Big Oil,'" Alsup commanded, joking about the Big Oil part (perhaps). "Tell me why you didn't make that motion."

Chevron's lawyers argued the quickest way to dispense with the case would be to press for its dismissal. SF Weekly has been reporting on the trail, and today has an insightful piece on why Chevron is tempting fate at the pink hands of SF liberals instead of the well-greased arteries of a banana republic:

The plaintiffs' lawyers cite a couple of good reasons why Chevron might be wary of sending the present case down to Ecuador. The company may be getting nervous about an ongoing case in Quito, the remnant of the case removed from the United States in the 1990s. The judge recently put the trial on the fast track, and a ruling is expected in the next year. That lawsuit demands a massive environmental remediation effort; Amazon Watch estimates it could cost $6 billion in total. Meanwhile, in New York federal court, Chevron is locked into a lawsuit with the government of Ecuador about who should pay for the cleanup or any other legal damages awarded.

With governmental relations already frayed by the litigation in New York, the company may also be wary of the anti-American, socialist sentiment on the rise throughout South America  what commentators have taken to calling the "pink tide" that has swept leftist leaders into power across the continent. "Ecuador just kicked Occidental Petroleum out, and the government is starting to make populist noises," says Terry Collingsworth, one of the plaintiffs' lawyers. "Chevron is damn nervous."

These macro forces mean little to Judge Alsup, however, as he wades through the muddy legal waters of this case that has its roots in a South American rainforest. In October, he spent a long day hearing testimony from experts flown up from Ecuador. The next day he would have to discuss how the Ecuadorian plaintiffs would be deposed, and whether they could appear for trial; there was some concern that the impoverished Indians wouldn't be able to get visas to enter the United States. It was the end of the afternoon, and the judge finally let his irritation show. "I just don't understand why a case that involves Ecuador is up here!" he burst out. "Now you want a lowly district judge in San Francisco to resolve it! It's all topsy-turvy."

Tom DeLay, the former House Speaker who began his working life in the Houston suburbs exterminating ants and roaches, made his name in Congress exterminating his opposition, and exterminated himself in a cloud of ethics scandals, has wrapped up his anihilatory political career by exterminating his paper trail. DeLay's former aides, who recently went to work for his interim Republican replacement, Shelley Sekula-Gibbs, deleted unnamed (and presumably sensitive) office files this week before quitting en-masse on Tuesday. A DeLay spokesman told the Times the trashing of files and scrubbing of hard drives was standard operating procedure for congressional transfers of power. Still, Sekula-Gibbs, who is occupying the seat until Democratic victor Nick Lampson is sworn in this January, has asked Congress to investigate the file deleting. You've got to hand it to the Exterminator for his skill creating scandalseven as his political life is upside down and twitching.

President Bush visited Vietnam today for the first time during his presidency, with the primary focus of strengthening business ties with the nation. Bush's trip to the country while we are engaged in a long and drawn out occupation conjured up questions about whether there are lessons to be learned from the war in Vietnam. In response, Bush, true to form, instead touted the country's steadfast resolve to succeed:

"One lesson is, is that we tend to want there to be instant success in the world, and the task in Iraq is going to take a while."

And, although it is hard to tell from the sliced footage of CNN that the folks over at Think Progress have, Bush, seems to continue his response, sticking to his tired guns, saying, "We'll succeed until we quit." Apparently, the big/important lesson from Vietnam seems to have slipped his mind.

According to an article in the Guardian, officials at the Pentagon working closely with the Iraq Study Group have leaked the key parts of the group's upcoming report. There appears to be a four point "victory strategy." Because President Bush is rumored to be taking the Iraq Study Group's recommendations very seriously, the content below may be as good an indicator of where Iraq policy is headed as we could possibly have. Worth a read. The points are:

(1) Point one of the strategy calls for an increase rather than a decrease in overall US force levels inside Iraq, possibly by as many as 20,000 soldiers.

(2) Point two of the plan stresses the importance of regional cooperation to the successful rehabilitation of Iraq. This could involve the convening of an international conference of neighbouring countries or more direct diplomatic, financial and economic involvement of US allies such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.... Yesterday, a top state department official, David Satterfield, said America was prepared in principle to discuss with Iran its activities in Iraq.

(3) Point three focuses on reviving the national reconciliation process between Shia, Sunni and other ethnic and religious parties. According to the sources, creating a credible political framework will be portrayed as crucial in persuading Iraqis and neighbouring countries alike that Iraq can become a fully functional state.... To the certain dismay of US neo-cons, initial post-invasion ideas about imposing fully-fledged western democratic standards will be set aside.

(4) Lastly, the sources said the study group recommendations will include a call for increased resources to be allocated by Congress to support additional troop deployments and fund the training and equipment of expanded Iraqi army and police forces. It will also stress the need to counter corruption, improve local government and curtail the power of religious courts.

And, yeah, the President seems to be buying it. Here's the lede from the Guardian article: "President George Bush has told senior advisers that the US and its allies must make "a last big push" to win the war in Iraq and that instead of beginning a troop withdrawal next year, he may increase US forces by up to 20,000 soldiers."

For Dave Gilson's and Tom Engelhardt's analysis of how all of this might leave us in Iraq indefinitely for months and years, see this blog post, directly below.

That's the question posed by Tom Engelhardt in a new piece that deflates some of the hype surrounding the retun of Robert Gates and Jim Baker. The conventional wisdom is that "daddy's boys" have arrived to (once again) save George W. Bush's butt from a fiasco of his own making. (See this week's Newsweek cover for the short version of this satisfying pop psych-meets-poli sci analysis.) But Engelhardt suspects that rather than advocating redeployment or withdrawal, Gates and Baker may just prolong our involvement by signing onto the recently floated plans to send more troops to give it the old school try:

...[P]erhaps the disaster behind us will be nothing compared to the disaster ahead, especially if Daddy's Boys, the Iraq Study Group, other Democratic and Republican movers and shakers, and all those generals and former generals floating around our world decide that this isn't the moment to rediscover a Colin Powell-style "exit strategy," but "one last chance" to succeed by any definition in Iraq. Then, god help us -- and the Iraqis. Sooner or later, we'll undoubtedly be gone from a land so determinedly hostile to being occupied by us, but that end moment could still be a long, long time in coming.

Here, for instance, is Robert Gates' thinking eighteen months ago in a seminar at the Panetta Institute at California State University in Monterey on "phased troop withdrawals" from Iraq:

"But Mr. Gates qualified his comments, noting it sometimes takes time to accomplish your goals. Sixty years after the end of the Second World War, 'there are still American troops in Germany,' he noted. 'We've had troops in Korea for over 50 years. The British have had troops in Cyprus for 40 years If you want to change history, you have to be prepared to stay as long as it takes to do the job."

So hold onto your hats. Tragedy and more tragedy seems almost guaranteed, and the Pentagon has just submitted to Congress a staggering $160 billion supplemental appropriation request in order to continue its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Engelhardt says we should expect "endless months or years of non-withdrawal withdrawal plans" combined with preparations for a permanent American presence in Iraq (a story that hasn't received much mainstream attention but was covered in MJlast year.) George Bush Sr.'s cavalry may have arrived, but we're far from being rescued.